Cohen Delays His Finding On Building Missile Shield

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

Published: August 8, 2000

WASHINGTON, Aug. 7—
Defense Secretary William S. Cohen postponed his recommendation today to President Clinton on whether to proceed with a limited national missile defense, citing ''a number of difficult issues'' that still have to be resolved.

Mr. Cohen, who had been widely expected to make his recommendation to the White House this week, did not specify the reasons for the delay of at least a month.

Officials said the Pentagon and its Ballistic Missile Defense Organization had not reached a consensus on critical aspects of the program to build the antimissile system. Those aspects, discussed in a flurry of meetings at the Pentagon in the last week, include the costs of building the system, the building schedule and the need for new tests, the officials said.

''Components of the Department of Defense are currently completing their assessment of the program to develop a national missile defense system,'' Mr. Cohen said in a statement released this afternoon. ''A number of difficult issues remain to be resolved before they can report to me.''

Mr. Cohen said there was ''no immediate or artificial deadline for a recommendation to the president,'' even though administration officials had previously indicated that Mr. Clinton would make his decision this summer or in the early fall.

At best, the postponement compresses the time left for Mr. Clinton to decide whether to continue with the system. It also means that he could be faced with a decision in the middle of a presidential election in which building a missile defense has emerged as a divisive issue. Mr. Cohen noted in his statement that ''the president fully supports this approach,'' referring to the postponement.

Mr. Cohen and other officials have indicated that the administration could begin work on the system -- clearing ground in Alaska to build an advanced radar station -- without violating the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, the agreement between the United States and the former Soviet Union that prohibited national missile defenses.

That would leave the final decision on building the system -- with or without the agreement of the Russians -- until next year, when a new administration will take office.

To meet the Pentagon's schedule for building a system by 2005, a decision to award contracts has to be made this fall for work to begin in the spring at the radar site, on a remote island in the Aleutians, administration officials said.

Mr. Cohen's recommendation has been complicated by the failure of a crucial test of the system last month, the officials said. In that test, a high-speed ''kill vehicle'' that was supposed to have intercepted a dummy warhead in space failed to separate from its booster rocket. The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization has attributed the failure to an error in the rocket's ''databus,'' which transmits signals to the the warhead, the officials said.

The officials played down the failure, saying it was caused by relatively old technology in the booster rockets that was not essential to the defensive system that the Pentagon is designing. Still, the failure denied the Pentagon critical information about the feasibility of the system that, one official said, could make it more difficult to argue for moving ahead.

''The part of the test that followed'' the error ''would have been useful,'' the official said.

The next test, scheduled for November, will almost certainly be postponed as officials make adjustments after the last failure.

In June, even before the failure of the test, an independent panel led by a retired Air Force general, Larry D. Welch, found that the proposed system was technologically feasible against an unsophisticated threat. The panel also recommended that additional tests be conducted before putting any system in the field.

One administration official said senior Pentagon and Ballistic Missile Defense Organization officials were divided over the need for more tests. Another official said delays in developing the new booster rockets for the system could also affect its deployment.

Several officials said they still expected Mr. Cohen to recommend moving ahead with the first steps of the system this year, keeping it on schedule for 2005, the year by which, intelligence officials said, North Korea could build a ballistic missile capable of hitting the United States.

One senior official said, however, that the date for putting a system into operation could still be pushed back.